How to Turn 1,000 Christmas Trees Into a Trip Around the World

The rambling life and curious finances of an itinerant Canadian Christmas tree seller.

It's Christmas Eve, 2012, and Brigitte is waiting for Santa Claus. The twenty-six year old French Canadian treeseller looks up and down the utterly empty New York City streets in the wee hours after she has taken down her tree stand for the year, waiting to find out what she made for a month of work. Sometime after midnight, a man from the tree company will come around to bring joy to all the treesellers all over the city. For this he has earned the nickname "Santa Claus."

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As the minutes pass, the city gets quieter than you'd think possible, the scant sounds dampened by piles of unsold Douglas Fir and Scots Pine trees. By spending the holiday season in New York, Brigitte will miss Christmas with her family back in rural Quebec, three hours North of Montreal. There, as in France, they celebrate right at the stroke of midnight. Around now, her family would have just returned from church services. The children would be opening their presents.

Brigitte (she asked that her last name not be used, as she's working in the U.S. illegally) and her two partners open a bottle of Nicolas Feuillatte brut champagne while they wait. Since Thanksgiving they have worked around the clock, selling, guarding and primping trees. It's a requirement in a city generally disinclined to getting much shuteye. Teachers buy trees in the mornings before class. Bartenders pay cash on their tipsy walks home in the middle of the night. Crafty parents sneak them into their apartments during lunch hour.

It's a grind. Every morning, Brigitte crawls out of her sleeping bag in the back of a parked van behind the trees, rolls herself into two pairs of long johns and a layer cake of fleeces, down vests, scarves, gloves and waterproof shell. She relieves the night shift at seven and spends the next fourteen hours lifting, smiling, haggling, cutting, trimming and sweeping the sticky needles off the sidewalk. She eats most of her meals standing in there with the door open, pinesap getting all over. At two, she gets a short break, where she can take a hot shower at the local Crunch gym. Her partners and her traded the owner for a tree one year and he has given them full gym access every year since.

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"It's like owning your own business for a month," she says. They rent a parking space and electricity on the corner of a street with heavy foot traffic and lots of residential buildings for a thousand dollars. The van runs them another six hundred, with about a grand each spent on meals, laundry, and maybe a beer here and there while they warm up at a local bar. There's another thousand in flights and transportation. No matter what she makes, it costs her twenty-three hundred dollars to work the short season.

Brigitte breaks off a bit of Christmas chocolate, the first bit of food she's had all month that didn't taste vaguely of pinesap. If the haul is four grand, they will survive the winter; five grand and some of them might save up to buy a new truck. Six grand, though, and she will buy herself a ticket to Nepal, where she can go trekking for a month. Brigitte is somewhere between Anne of Green Gables and the waitress from Neil Young's "Unknown Legend." She's what the French call a bourlinguer. A knockabout. A rolling stone. We had become friends a few Christmases ago when she set up shop at the end of my street. After I bought a tree from her, she came to my tree-decorating party and warmed up over hot buttered rum and Elvis holiday tunes. "For someone working eight to five in Montreal it's not such a good job," she had said. "But for us, traveling and farming, it's very good. Plus," she added, smiling, "I love living in my little forest in the middle of the city."

Back at the stand, her cohorts' eyes dart around at any sign of life.

Just after midnight, Santa Claus pulls up in a rusted box truck. Brigitte and her partners load in the unsold trees into the truck. They'll be mulched in the Bronx. After a minute going over the books, Santa Claus pays them for the year. She never mentions what the final haul is. I say goodbye to my friend and they pile into the van drive home through the night.

A month later, I get a postcard from Nepal.

Brendan Jay Sullivan's first book, a memoir of his friendship with Lady Gaga, Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives was published in August.

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